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SingStar Pop

I hate karaoke. I learned this years ago, about six Tsingtaos into a party, when I stepped to the mike. My timing was rotten, I mangled lyrics, and I kept having to reach into the falsetto register. But a new video game for the Sony PlayStation 2 has me reconsidering. SingStar Pop, which goes on sale this week, lets you sing along with 30 music videos (the real ones, not cheesy cheap remakes) from artists like Cyndi Lauper, Franz Ferdinand, and Alicia Keys. In addition to the lyrics, the game displays the melody in musical notes and tracks how close your singing comes to the original. Accuracy gets points. Once I started getting positive feedback, I couldn’t put the mike down. One night, I stayed up till 2 a.m. practicing Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” Sure, I was all alone in my apartment, but I sounded great. Or at least that’s what PlayStation told me.